Writer Profile

Books & Essays

Book Review #1:David Taylor is the naturalist of the human heart. His poems guide the reader to the very edge where words give way to the secret of the world. ?John P. O?Grady

Book Review #2:No matter where David Taylor finds himself, in Denton, Flagstaff, or Spartanburg, he is always at home. For him, place always begins with location, but is much more in the end. He takes us by the hand down healing and cleansing waters. A poet, in every sense of the word, even in dry, rocky streambeds, he finds freshets of water that lift his spirit and imagination. Based on ?blood knowledge? of place David Taylor?s poetry instructs, resurrects body and soul, rekindles love. ?Florence Shepard

Description: David Taylor's chapter is entitled "Paddling the Urban Sprawl of North Texas."

Book Review #1:Taylor (editor of South Carolina Naturalists) has gathered essays that express an affinity for the natural landscape of Texas as they celebrate a state in flux. The late naturalist Roy Bedichek's "Still Water" focuses on the vermilion flycatcher extending its range north from the tropics. In a tribute to the environment on the banks of the Rio Grande, Carol Cullar writes that the limestone has literally become a part of her bones. In his own essay, Taylor says that he has made his peace with the loss of ancient wilderness to development. The strength of the selections lies both in the skill of the writers and the variety of their subject matter. City boy Gerald Thurmond, for example, gives an eloquent and humorous description of his attempts to forge a bond with his rural father-in-law. In a particularly powerful piece, Stephen Harrigan describes a trip with his daughter to the peak of Enchanted Rock, a place that Native Americans held to be sacred and where, he says, a part of the original Texas still exists: it "had not been wholly digested somehow, and in some places... you could still feel its insistent identity." from Publishers Weekly

Description: In this deeply personal journey, author David Taylor takes an illustrated voyage down the Lawsons Fork, an urban stream that crosses the city of Spartanburg, South Carolina. His mythic float takes him back in time, to an era when the river provided hunting grounds for pre-historic civilizations, trails for European settlers, and power for early forms of industry. It brings him face to face with the modern role that rivers like the Lawsons have served--that of drainage ditches for burgeoning Sunbelt populations.

Along the way, Taylor provides an interpretive map of the natural history of Lawsons Fork and presents an ode to the many heroic people who have labored to protect its waters. He dutifully answers many of Spartanburgs questions about the stream: How clean is it? What plants and animals are still found there? What parts are navigable? And who was Lawson anyway?

Co-author Gary Henderson offers numerous in-depth profiles of the people who live,work and play along the Lawsons. They offer up their memories of the creek and their hopes for its continued recovery.

The narrative is accompanied by dozens of illustrations by nature artist Helen Correll and by the work of a wide group of Spartanburg photographers. They provide an interior glimpse of a natural resource few have seen, except from bridge crossings. Integrated throughout the book is the creative work of local poets, including a group of young students from a school in the watershed.

Together these writers, photographers and artists present a complex and intriguing portrait of an urban stream and the community that it traverses. "The Lawsons Fork: Headwaters to Confluence," is a journey readers wont soon forget